Ten Timid Ghosts: Halloween Reading Extension and Story Play Ideas

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Looking for some more Halloween themed learning? This is one of our newest Halloween additions this year. My kids LOVE this story and it’s perfect to inspire lots of homeschooling/quarantine activity ideas. The fact that it’s less than $5 at the time of writing this doesn’t hurt either!

One of our new favorite games is finding a book we’ve never read before and without even talking about the title looking through the pictures to think about what is happening. Sometimes we make up our own story about a picture or sometimes we just try to guess what will happen on a couple of pages before we start reading, but either way the kids are improving those critical thinking skills with some quick, easy fun! They’ve engaged their imaginations and their reading comprehension with a few simple questions. Just keep it as open ended as possible and don’t give away the story yourself!

I love this story in particular because they are already so excited for Halloween, but also because it’s a great example of natural learning in our day. We’re not only reading a story but starting to think about some math and friendship skills as well. We’re counting backwards which is a great beginner way to talk about subtraction. Plus we started having kid led discussions on how to share a house vs scaring someone out of it. Once they brought this up we were able to brainstorm different solutions and different ways to share – a great strategy for collaboration with each other and their friends if we ever make it back to school.

After we’d read it a few times throughout the week we created our own haunted houses to play out the story. I cut a few house shapes out of cardboard from recent packages – you could also just use paper, but we wanted big ones. The kids painted them black and added some yellow squares and rectangles to be windows. I also cut them each out 10 ghosts (Stickers would also have been great here, but I had a bit of paper to use up).

We even used the wet paint as glue which made clean up so easy!

To finish we added a few pumpkin stickers and doors upon their request. Then the next time we read they were able to decide which of their ghosts were getting scared in the story. It was a great way to keep them engaged in the book and also having some fun with arts and crafts (working on those fine motor skills too).

Home School Halloween Sensory Play

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